Sherry Chandler

In Liverpool, England, theater director Robert sculptor Richard Wilson has created a new temporary public artwork called “Turning the Place Over.” On a building to be demolished, Wilson has caused an 8-meter section of exterior wall to rotate in and out of the façade. The geometry of the rotation is complex and therefore the video is the only way for the virtual traveler to know a little of the work.

Link from Donna Marder.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before the Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale will still sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

—D. H. Lawrence, quote from The Atheist’s Bible, ed. Joan Konner (HarperCollins, 2007)

This quotation struck me as poignant, not so much because I think it’s a great argument, but in light of the fact that we may, in fact, now be in the process of destroying ourselves. Not the planet. Ourselves.

The question may be how many species we take with us. Plants, surely, will survive, and perhaps the birds, which being descended from the dinosaurs may be said already to have survived one mass annihilation. Mankind may end, not with a bang, but with a chirrup.

A work colleague argued passionately this week that this warming is just a natural correction. This colleague is a good guy, hardworking and helpful, but I fail to understand the relevance of his argument. If the warming is cyclic, I still don’t see why we have to make it worse. In fact, if we value our own species, I’d say we ought to do everything we can to minimize it.

Rosalie has sent me a link to a Bill McKibben article in Orion in which he addresses our reluctance to take the blame:

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in early April, a member of the editorial board concluded: “The consensus that human activities are causing global warming is purely a social invention—there’s no way of showing it to be so, and no self-evident reason for preferring to believe it’s so. The ‘consensus’ is, in truth, a product of itself.” That’s utter nonsense, of course—the physics and chemistry of global warming are relatively simple and widely accepted. But it’s emotionally counterintuitive to imagine that we’re able to alter something as basic as the climate; we all hope that somehow it simply isn’t true. It’s too hard a truth, some days, to wrap our heads around. (It’s also expensive to wrap your head around if you plan on doing anything about it, which may be the real reason the Journal ends up sputtering.)

Heads in the sand. Works every time.